WE PULLED INTO the second camp feeling buoyant and eager to make our altruistic adventure a success. Pete was especially keen to see things work out. As with Geoff, his time for difficult summits was waning. He had recently gotten married to American filmmaker Liesl Clark, who had a son from a previous relationship, and the couple was expecting a baby in August. Pete had taken on a kind of emeritus status at TNF—Conrad called him "Celestial Pete Athans"—and it had empowered him to do some real good.

As much as any of us, Pete understood that in the world of nonprofit fundraising, as in high-altitude-résumé building, exposure was everything. If he could leverage his clout as a climber to help HCP and Tilganga, then climbing Cholatse was simply a bonus. "This is an experiment," Pete told me. "It's certainly the direction I want my own career to go, and it puts a human face on the brand."

The spirit of philanthropy was all around us in Phaplu, a commercial hub of 6,500 people with a long

Mountaineering is dismal business. You learn anew each time to hate cold, hate gravity, hate darkness and snow and ice and rock, hate gray, rehydrated food. You hate headaches, stomachaches, lethargy, and fear. And yet you learn to love having climbed.

history of hosting charitable foreigners. The Solu Hospital itself had been built in 1975 by Sir Edmund Hillary, followed by a school—groundbreaking goodwill projects that were tarnished for Hillary when his wife and daughter were killed in a plane crash on their way to meet him there that year. Now 86, Hillary doesn't get to Nepal much anymore, but his work continues through the New Zealand– based Himalayan Trust.

Much remains to be done. Mingmar Gyelzen Sherpa, Solu Hospital's sweet, melancholy director, told me that most people in the area still lack the simplest necessities: soap, birth control, antibiotics. The civil war wasn't helping, he lamented; the Maoists had doled out uniforms, guns, and a call to action, but they weren't doing much for the common good. Phaplu had been the site of several bloody melees, attempts to seize control of its airstrip, and Mingmar himself had patched together soldiers on both sides of the fight.

SEE ME, HEAR ME: With eyes still covered against the dust, Phaplu patients gather for a post-op lecture.(Ace Kvale)

"Tourists used to come here and say, ‘It's so beautiful. It's so peaceful,' " Mingmar said. "And we would say, ‘What? It is just hills and rocks and trees.' We didn't even know what peace was. But now that we have lost it, we know."

As the second eye camp ramped up, the climbers slotted into the work flow like old pros. Kris and Kevin took up posts in Anesthesia, wiping eyes with Betadine and wrapping feet in sterile blue bags. Conrad and Abby shuttled people to and from the OR. Jordan and Pete hovered near the operating tables, helping Geoff and Ruit, who seemed much more engaged with our team.

Each morning the doctors and patients would gather in the hospital's sunny courtyard to remove the bandages from the previous day's surgeries. This was invariably a joy-filled occasion. These old men and women were about to once again see their gardens, their goats, their stone homes built into green hills beneath gray mountains, the sweet, sooty faces of their grandchildren. They would have their lives back.

As the eye patches fell to the grass, one man leaped up and started dancing with Ruit. Another man, a wiry old Brahman proudly dressed in a threadbare army tunic circa 1970, stood up, clapped his heels together, and snapped his hand to his forehead in salute, his lower lip trembling, tears streaming down his craggy face.

"It is like seven suns," a Rai woman in her seventies told me, clearly ecstatic. She was getting ready to leave with her granddaughter, who shared her symmetrical features and, now, identical brown eyes. She jostled the girl giddily. "Now I can see what my kids are feeding me."

Buddha Maya's bandages came off on the last day. She seemed mildly confused at first, then lit up, shuffling forward with gathering confidence and a brightening expression. She stood out in a blue North Face pullover given to her by Dawa. She touched the doctors and the climbers and then shuffled past us and out of the yard. A few people wondered aloud where she was going. Since she would be walking back home, she'd gone off to do what anyone would do after having their sight wondrously restored—she went shoe shopping.